In a restaurant such as a casual dining restaurant, developing measures for improving the operation of the restaurant based on a result of analysis of the status of customer service provided by the restaurant staff is beneficial to improve the customer satisfaction and streamline the operation of the restaurant, thereby increasing the sales and profit of the restaurant.
In connection with the status of customer service at a restaurant, there is conventionally known a technology that uses mobile terminals held by staff members to show each staff member a procedure to be followed when delivering menu items to a table and/or to notify the staff member of a timing to clear up the table (see JP2007-328385A).
In a restaurant such as a casual dining restaurant, various wait times, in which a customer must wait for service, may occur during the time from when the customer enters the restaurant to when the customer leaves the restaurant, and these wait times reduce customer satisfaction and may result in complaints from customers. Therefore, knowing the actual state of wait times and developing improvement measures for reducing the wait times can contribute to avoiding complaints from customers and improving customer satisfaction. Further, this can increase the customer turnover rate and streamline the operation of the restaurant, thereby improving the sales and profit of the restaurant.
However, the conventional technology only has a function of providing instructions to restaurant staff members to enable or assist the staff members to perform work accurately and promptly, and is not specifically designed to achieve a purpose of obtaining information that makes it possible to know the actual customer service status of the restaurant.
In the conventional technology, restaurant staff members perform input operations not only when they take orders from customers or when they check out customers, but also when they deliver ordered menu items to tables, and thus, it may be conceived to obtain information that can represent the actual customer service status from the information input by restaurant staff members. However, to obtain information representing the actual customer service status in detail, it is necessary for the staff members to frequently perform input operations, and this would increase the burden on the staff members. Therefore, technology is desired that can make it possible to know the actual customer service status without requiring staff members to perform cumbersome work such as input operations.